In one year’s time, the world will meet in Copenhagen to decide the fate of our climate.  Leading up to this event are a series of high profile meetings and negotiations—Tokyo, Bali, and this place.  The UNFCCC COP 14 negotiations take place in a vast fairground in chilly Poznan, Poland.  Delegates and observers from every continent stride the heated walkways that connect the various large buildings.  A building for international negotiations; a building for NGOs; a building for the European Delegation.  Along the way are booths and displays for solar companies, energy ministries, and environmental organizations.  Children’s paintings, photo exhibitions, and giant banners remind us of the urgency of the crisis and the height of the stakes—“Europe, it’s time to lead.” “The world is watching.”  “A hard rain’s a gonna fall.”  A dying polar bear, looking all too human, holds a styrofoam cup and a cardboard sign—“No coins please, it’s change I need.”

This is the environmental Olympic Games—impeccably organized but inherently unpredictable.  In the negotiation hall, nations do battle over every word, of every sentence, of every paragraph, of every draft text which rolls the train of international climate negotiations a little further down the track.  At nearby side events, scientists, activists, and politicians present their latest findings, projects, and programs to the world.  And informally, thousands of conferees of all backgrounds rub shoulders, share intelligence, forge alliances, exchange factsheets, type blackberry messages and press releases, and make friends over Polish canapés and wine.  Can this crew of conferees negotiate an agreement on climate in Poznan, and then in Copenhagen?  For the sake of the dying bear, we had better.

Poznan was the original capital of Poland from the 11th to 13th centuries.  The first prince of Poland was baptized in a brick cathedral on an island in the river.  Ten centuries later Pope John Paul II was invested in the same cathedral.  This cathedral of two-toned brick and two towers still stands today, and was the setting for a moving Christmas Chorale performed by the children of Poznan for the climate conferees.  At the center of Poznan is a decorative town hall.  At twelve noon every Sunday, two goats emerge from the clock tower of the hall and butt heads twelve times.  In December the square around the hall is adorned by ice sculptures, a manger, a Christmas market, colorful Old European buildings, restaurants and cafes, and crowds of fashionable and festive Poles.  The whole scene is as priceless as a visa commercial, right down to the old woman who pinches my side and commands me to eat more.

Santa Rita Vineyard

Climate change is affecting the cost of conservation not only in Madagascar, but around the world.  Teams of scientists from Chile, South Africa, California, and Madagascar spent this summer trying to estimate the cost burden of climate change on conservation.  We all met in the Chilean wine country with a science communications expert to hone and harmonize our messages for an hour-long presentation to the World Conservation Congress in October in Barcelona.  The setting for our workshop was a beautiful vineyard dating back to 1880, with hills, birds, cacti, fountains, gardens, and lots of grapes.  The Madagascar message sounds something like this:  “Protecting Madagascar’s unique plants and animals from climate change requires not only protect existing rainforests, but also planting new rainforests.  And that becomes expensive.”

After 60 hours of air travel, stumbling out of the Santiago airport and into a clear blue sky and the snow-capped peaks of the Andes was quite literally a breath of fresh air.  A quick van ride later and I was in the heart of the Maipa Valley—Chile’s wine country.  When I unpacked by suitcase, I realized my brand new camera had disappeared.  Now, bad things happen all over the world, and it’s conceivable that the camera could have jumped out of the suitcase during layovers in Paris, DC, or Atlanta.  But, I doubt the camera ever left Johannesburg.  First, Johannesburg airport is notorious for theft: see here and here.  Second, on other travels through JNB I have personally experienced extortion (“give me something to make sure your luggage arrives”) and a set up for a robbery (Me: “could you tell me how to get to the domestic terminal?” Him: “follow me up these stairs.”  Stairs: “Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.”)  And third, one current scare story of crime and corruption in South Africa is of customs officials coordinating with local gangs to tail and attack arriving passengers who declare large amounts of currency (I dodged a bullet by comparison).

So I learned a lesson today: don’t pack small valuable items in your checked baggage.  Especially in Johannesburg.  I don’t miss the camera as such.  I just would have liked to have been able to upload my hundreds of Madagascar photos.

The South West Townships

During my twelve hour layover in Johannesburg, I took a tour of Soweto. Johannesburg’s sprawling South West Townships are home to mile after mile of squatter settlements, interspersed with bleak former all-male mine workers’ hostels from which families were forbidden, new government-constructed houses, and the occasional middle class neighborhood. We visited one neighborhood with shabby tin-roofed shacks stretching along a dusty one lane road as far as the eye could see. In the road a dead rat was covered in flies. The guide showed us inside one of the one-room shacks. The tiny space contained a stove, a countertop, a dresser, a bed, and enough floor space for a small mattress. The woman of the house said she shared the house with her four grand daughters. She said she had been living in the house for thirteen years. Every year the government tells her she will be able to move into one of the millions of new government houses being built, and every year she continues to wait.

The weka: Nature's dumbest?

New Zealand

and Madagascar are similar in many respects.  Both are large island nations in the southern hemisphere.  Both split off from their respective mainlands tens of millions of years ago, and are populated with a fascinating variety of plants and animals found nowhere else on earth.  In both places, the survival of these native plants and animals is threatened by species introduced by humans, who arrived only within the last two thousand years.  And both islands are far colder during the winter months than any civilized place has a right to be.  But there is an intriguing difference between New Zealand and Madagascar—in New Zealand, the birds became mammals, while in Madagascar, the mammals became birds.

In New Zealand, with the exception of two bats, there were never any land mammals.  The role of grazing and ground foraging was taken over by birds.  Because these birds were not troubled by predators, many became flightless and dimwitted, like the weka.  In Madagascar on the other hand, though there are plenty of birds, the task of dispersing the seeds of rainforest plants has largely been taken over by lemurs!  And since lemurs are far more hesitant than birds to stray far from their rainforest surroundings, this means that a patch of land in Madagascar must be very near existing rainforest to regenerate rainforest “naturally.”

Three days from now, I leave Antananarivo, Madagascar, for Santiago Chile, via Johannesburg, Paris, Washington, DC, and Atlanta.  From aiport to airport, I’ll be travelling for 60 hours.  This is the time it takes to fly from New York City to Tokyo and back again, twice.  I’ll have been both north and south of the equator, and both east and west of the prime meridian, in less than three days.

Indiana Jones Map

My hotel has grown on me over the last six weeks.  Sure the lighting is dim, the carpet and drapes are The Shining red and the plumbing is off-and-on, but the staff are friendly, I occasionally get set up in the penthouse suite at no extra cost, and there is free wireless.  But the best thing about my hotel is the menu:

10. Velvety of French beau [green beans]

9. Shrimp jumped in the vegetables [I eat this one regularly]

8. Duck breast wipes in sweet wine of the country

7. Flackes of zebu

6. Pavement of chocolate in vanilla perfume [fudge in chantilly]

5. Duet of shrimp and squid oyster wipes

4. Has supper half moon [yeah, no idea]

3. Crudeness of garden

2. Toffly [for dessert]

and…

1. Chicken breast wipes/forestiere/basque woman

Verreaux Sifaka, mother and child

I love observing animals in the wild.  And for a wild animal lover, Madagascar is tops:

Final tally of lemurs observed in the wild

Common brown lemur

Indri

Ring-tailed lemur

Verreaux’s sifaka

Red-fronted brown lemur

Grey mouse lemur

White-footed sportive lemur

Pale fork-marked lemur

Red-tailed sportive lemur

Noteworthy non-lemur wildlife observed in the wild

Chameleons large and small

A frog with translucent skin and blue bones

A snake which jumped fully off the ground

Madagascar hissing cockroach

Bird of paradise

Narrow-striped mongoose

Fossa

Whales (humpbacks or southern rights) jumping clear out of the water

Sea hares

Noteworthy wildlife observed in captivity

A mouse lemur named after my boss: Microcebus mittermeieri

A Nile crocodile covered in bird poop

A (reputedly) 200-year old Aldabra tortoise

Radiated tortoise

The fossa is an animal with the body of a cat and the face of a dog.  Its nearest relative is in fact the mongoose.  It is generally an elusive forest predator.  At Kirindy Forest, in western Madagascar, there is a fossa who predates on the camp chickens, the camp tuna fish, and so forth.  This fossa is not elusive.  He put on a good show, skulking about camp while I photographed.  Steve, a Brit I met at Kirindy, found fossa pawprints on his bed and his cell phone missing.  Could the fossa have predated the cell phone?

Fact: According to my guidebook, the fossa has the largest penis bone in relation to its size of any mammal, and can copulate for six hours straight.